


have mercy on me, o lord, for i am weak.

by loveinheaven



Category: Carrie (1976), Carrie (2002), Carrie (2013), Carrie - All Media Types, Carrie - Stephen King, Carrie: The Musical - Gore/Pritchard/Cohen
Genre: Alternate Ending, Blood, Bullying, Canon Rewrite, Canonical Character Death, Carrie White Character Study, Catholic Guilt, Character Analysis, Character Death, Character Study, Don't Examine This Too Closely, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Graphic Description, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Stephen King, Long Shot, Motifs, Murder, My First Work in This Fandom, Not Beta Read, Not my usual style, Prom, Religious Content, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stephen King's Carrie References, Supernatural Elements, Symbolism, Too many deaths, beta readers are for the weak, but i’ve been working on it on-and-off since february, but what if carrie wasn't blamed for every goddamn thing, carrie white deserved better, different style than usual, i actually wrote this as a massive character analysis for when i played carrie, literally just taking stephen king's content and saying, not beta read bc we die like MEN, not original at all, style mimicry, that'd be nice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26768404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveinheaven/pseuds/loveinheaven
Summary: psalm 6:2“have mercy on me, o lord, for i am weak. lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled.”the familiar story of the black prom, told in a way that shows carrie white as the victim she truly was.- - -akaa long ass character study/a rewrite of the last chunk of the book because everyone demonizes carrie and she deserves better than that :(
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	have mercy on me, o lord, for i am weak.

**Author's Note:**

> content advisory: this piece contains  
> \- lots of blood  
> \- canonical character death  
> \- spoilers lol  
> so like. be careful okay :)

Jesus meant to be merciful.

Carrie never knew a God who killed the innocent. She never knew a world in which it was her mission to destroy all corruption and bring peace to everyone. She was no dove, she was an eagle. Just another substandard girl.

She was ordinary.

She was not like her mother, not a dove, not trying to save the world. She was not like Chris and Billy and Norma and all those kids who laughed at her-

_and Tommy and Sue?_

She was not a raven, the raven called Sin who plagued the world with its recklessness and lust and thirst for blood.

“ _Pig’s blood for a pig.”_

Carrie didn’t want to hurt anyone. She only wanted her pain to end.

It was everywhere, the blood covered her hands and arms and face and dress-

_I made it myself. I worked hard on it, I made it for my perfect night-_

and she stood in it and it was in her mouth and her eyes and it was getting inside her, now. She felt the way the blood burnt up her insides; she felt the way it caused things to stir up inside her that she hadn’t felt since that day in the showers…

“ _Plug it up, bitch!”_

She wanted to. She wanted to put a cork in these emotions and let the boiling stop inside her. She hoped the pressure of the stares, the laughing, the gawking, would stop her from shattering from the inside out. A watched pot never boils. 

They always stared at her; they never paid her any mind. They never noticed her unless she was on the wrong end of a joke. Always heard, never listened to. Always spoken about, never spoken to.

She saw Sue in the crowd. She saw Sue standing there, in jeans and a blouse- it was cream-colored with lace trim on the top, and looked soft, almost angelic- not her prom dress. Not the pink dress she’d been dreaming about for four years.

_Or was it blue? Maybe she wanted blue. I wonder how Sue would have looked in a blue dress. It would be nice for her._

She saw Sue and saw the look of brokenness on her face. Everything moved so slowly that Carrie could feel the path that every single drop of blood took down her body. She felt every detail of every bit of icy red terror on her skin and hair and dress. She saw Sue’s eyes go from fearful to hopeless in half a second, and yet, she saw every stage of the shift.

_If only Sue got to go to her Prom._

_If only Sue was standing here._

_If only Chris was the one covered in blood._

_“Pig’s blood for a pig.”_

The boiling came to a surge and she felt something inside of her break. She felt something shift, something change, something almost hot, almost painful (flex), almost sinful, almost fiery and halting and enough that she felt winded, but she didn’t know if it was the panic (flex) or the embarrassment (flex, flex)...

_No._

She pictured, in her mind’s eye, an image of relief. It was water on her skin. It was something clean, and she wondered for a moment if this meant she had finally died and somehow, somehow, Jesus decided to reconcile her for her sins and wash her clean of her mistakes and forgive her-

_Rain. Good. Water._

_Did Jesus forgive me? Am I gone, is it over? Does he wash me in the river now, just like Mama always told me he would?_

(flex. flex. flex.)

_The fire alarms. Piercing, stabbing, blood, bleeding, curse, no more, no more!!_

(flex. this one felt longer. heavier.)

One of the wires from the lights split in two, the charged end landing in a spilled puddle of punch, and a fire started in a surge, engulfing the Prom banner in its hellish orange glow-

_He will burn you. He burns the sinners._

Water from the sprinkler system started to fall. Carrie thought it had already kissed her skin, but no, it was only a fleeting thought. Wishful thinking. She dwelled on the thought for too long and now everyone’s prom dresses and suits were marked with beads of not-rain. (flex. again and again and again, a spasm, beyond her control)

_No. No no no no I couldn’t have started the water. Not the fire. None of it. I couldn’t have._

It was spiraling now, it was all moving so fast and everyone was screaming and the only thing Carrie could hear was the sounds of terror and scared-to-death-but-still-breathing, and her heart rate elevated from the chaos around her, and the blood was cold but the fire was warm. Should she have relished the warmth of the fire? She didn’t know.

Her knees buckled, she could barely move. She knew that with one step in any direction, she might slip and fall into the blood (it wouldn’t matter anyhow, it was already everywhere), and she only wanted it to stop, she wanted everything to stop.

_“Carrie White eats shit.”_

She ruined everything she touched. A reverse King Midas, where instead of everything turning to gold, it all turns to ashes. To destruction. Fire, death, chaos, screaming, so much screaming, and she didn’t know why!

She wanted it to stop. She lifted an arm and something inside her tightened and twisted and writhed (was there something sick inside her? or was she the monster now?) and she felt it clawing at her insides (and God made Eve to bear the curse of blood).

_Screaming. Stop the screaming._

(flex. more. again. painful.)

The gymnasium grew one scream quieter.

Carrie opened her eyes and saw the reason for the sudden silence, and before she could understand why, George looked as though he mangled his own neck, the chaos and fear crescendoed once more. The knives of sound cut through her ears and brain and she hoped the heat would cauterize her bleeding but no, the blood dripped onto her dress from her hair and the bucket above her still spat the occasional drop of cold, crimson hatred onto her crown.

_Enough, enough, enough!_

She was out of control. She knew she was out of control. They laughed at her, they pointed at her, and now they were afraid of her. A weight in the bottom of her stomach prompted her to wonder how far she could go with this mad power. How many lives could she ruin in order to make sure no one ever forgot her name again? They were afraid of her now.

_Good. They know how it feels._

She didn’t consciously think about anything so maddening. She was not _consciously_ thinking about anything at all. Fight or flight. Fight or flight.

_“Pig’s blood for a pig.”_

She’d never fly, anyway.

(flex)

Another scream, and this time, as sickening as it was to her, there was something satisfying about seeing someone suffer for just a moment as she did for her entire life. She would teach her tormentors a lesson and then let them go with only scars. 

_Nobody dies from a scar._

And then Carrie heard shrieks that, for once, she could recognize the words of. 

“He’s not breathing!”

“Shit! Shit, she’s crazy!”

“What’s going on? What’s going on?!”

“Get out, get out of here!”

“The doors are locked-”

“What?”

“No, the fucking doors are locked! Carrie’s gone batshit!”

_No I haven’t no I haven’t, stop saying my name like that (at least you said it, but I’m not going crazy!), stop it!_

Everyone kept screaming, except for the small handful of people that laid on the ground, faces frozen in fear, as if they had choked on their own fright and died right there because of it.

_Stop playing dead it’s not funny the last time I screamed like that I didn’t get help, I got tampons thrown at me and laughter and a rain of broken glass from shattered light bulbs._

All she wanted was for it to stop, stop, stop (flex), stop, quiet down (flex), no more screaming (flex, flex), no more blood (a flex that made her feel strained).

_No more no more no more, stay away, get out!_

The room grew quieter in increasingly shorter intervals. Two screams stopped, then five, then nine, then ten people all at once as though they’d been gagged. Twenty. Twenty-eight. Thirty-two.

Silence.

Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan were still up in the rafters, she could feel it. She knew how Billy felt. She knew how Chris felt.

She held her breath for a moment before she felt a weight drop in her stomach, and then the familiar feeling of Billy was erased from her mind, almost as though it was only ever a memory.

Chris screamed.

_Shut up, you don’t know how it feels to hurt._

She held her breath until Chris stopped screaming. She felt both of them gone, not alive but not not-alive, just resting, just waiting until they could take control of the school again, but not Carrie. No. Carrie was the real puppetmaster now.

_Now they know a little of what pain feels like. They’ll wake up and they’ll remember this and they’ll know my name._

She turned toward the exit, stepping forward just enough that she saw something- someone- move in the corner of her eye. Someone with a slightly blood-spattered rental suit and sweet blond hair, someone she never wanted to hurt.

She ran towards Tommy Ross and knelt next to him.

_I’m so sorry._

Her heart crumbled at the sight of Tommy trembling like that, the way he held himself and shook, as though Carrie had become some sort of monster- a thought she couldn’t deal with- and she put her hand to his cheek.

He flinched. The blood was cold but his skin was warm. Hot. Full of life.

_I hate you for doing this to me, you hurt me so much._

She wanted to kiss him. She’d never get to kiss him.

_I might have loved you. Oh, Tommy..._

If she touched him, she’d leave a red handprint on his face. She knew she’d leave one as she placed her hand on his cheek. She knew she would leave one before she even pulled her hand away. She held him for a moment, wishing she could take it all back, make him forget.

(flex, gently, keep Tommy safe)

She felt him forgetting. She felt him falling asleep, felt his cheek begin to meet the temperature of the blood (cold, bitter cold), and she lowered his head to the ground.

“You didn’t hurt me,” she said softly, brushing his hair out of his eyes. She reached out and unfastened his boutonniere from his suit jacket, cradling it in her hands, and then-

_Sue-_

She gripped the boutonniere tighter and started running. 

_They’ll remember me. Tommy and Sue will hate themselves for doing this, but they’ll repent. This isn’t for the good ones. I’ll only frighten the bad ones enough that they won’t write swears by my name in the yearbook this time._

Carrie was in such a state of shock that she barely grasped that her tormentors were dead. All that mattered was that they were unable to reach her now.

_Tommy will wake before the fire takes him. He’s not a sinner. They’ll all wake up if they really regret hurting me._

_They’ll wake up and next time they see me, they’ll say my name and nobody will laugh._

_________________

  
  


While Carrie White was running home in the wake of what would eventually be known as the Black Prom (or, in the quiet gossip of people who all claimed to have known her family, the Carrie White Incident), Margaret White was sharpening her knife.

Margaret had always been an almost prophetic voice to her precious Carrietta, and she was preparing to serve the most painful act of mercy she could possibly imagine. Jesus called upon her, and her alone, to take Carrietta out of her misery.

_Why couldn’t my classmates have let this misery end sooner? Maybe then, I wouldn’t feel as though a part of me were about to die._

The fire continued to blaze behind her, but Carrie ran on, towards her home, towards the gravity that pulled her there and told her there was something (someone?) else waiting for her, someone other than Mama, someone other than Jesus, whose eyes followed her everywhere she went from his place on the crucifix. Someone good. Someone good, but not holy. Someone kind, but not always merciful. Someone human, someone like Carrie.

_“You’re not like the other girls, Carrie,” Mama always said. “You’re special.” And I thought, maybe so. Maybe I’m not always like them, but I’m a little like them. Or maybe it’s the opposite; maybe all of them are a little like me._

Margaret’s slender fingers felt oddly comfortable around the knife’s handle. The wood was soft, smooth. Almost forgiving. The knife could reconcile her just as Jesus would.

_Open the door. Mama will understand. She forgave me once._

Carrie’s entire body trembled. The blood was now even colder on her body, and she felt so vulnerable, so exposed. Every part of her was covered in it. She wanted the feelings to stop.

_The twisting is back. Not cramping, but in the same place. It feels tight and writhing and uncontrollable. I hate it I hate it I hate it._

(flex)

The lock clicked open. Carrie reached for the doorknob.

_So scared, so cold._

She pushed. The scary part was over. Mama was there. Carrie could see her. With that realization, with the sighting of her mother standing like an angel in her long nightgown (guidance, safety, heaven, forgiveness, could Carrie be forgiven? or did she need to? wasn’t it the other kids who should have to repent?), she ran into the house, door slamming behind her (flex), and nearly fell into her mother’s arms.

“Mama, please hold me,” she sobbed, sinking to the ground. Margaret fell with her, holding her precious daughter close as they lowered to the ground. Blood seeped through her nightgown and she felt it against her legs, her thighs, her chest (and God made Eve to bear the curse of blood).

It almost hurt her to feel the cold and the stickiness, and to breathe the coppery smell of rotting and death and hopelessness. Her mother was singing to her. It would be okay. She listened to the song, she hummed along through her strangled tears. She tried to ignore the way that when she cried, the tears ran red down her face and left pink stains against her mother’s satin nightdress.

She closed her eyes and felt two tears roll down her cheeks. There was something different, something conclusive, about them.

_What is that? What am I feeling, what is it what is it??_

Carrie opened her eyes and the pain finally set in. It screamed, it overtook her entire body and set it on fire. It shattered every bone in her back and turned her into a sobbing, yelling mess. It was fire, it was glass, it was breaking glass inside her skin and muscle and against her spine and everything felt so angry but so fragile and she backed up, reaching an arm up to feel the site of all this pain, and she felt her fingers touch something slender, long, familiar. It was warm from her mother’s hand.

She pulled. White-hot pain. No words, only screaming. Only television static, a high-pitched busy signal, a throaty cry that felt the same as swallowing molten lava. 

She felt a surge of blood (warm, this time, and warm blood was almost foreign to her by now) down her back, and she removed her mother’s knife.

_We’d always make pie and she’d serve it with this knife._

She let out the loudest scream she’d ever made. The pictures on the wall trembled, and she was not sure if it was because of the volume of her yell or (flex) the chaos in her mind.

She’d never imagined her mother to make a face so oddly satisfied but truly horrified. She was looking at an alien creature. It was as though Margaret’s heart was synced with her daughter’s, and she felt Margaret’s life fading from its deep, pulsing crimson to a muted, empty, tear-stained pink as Carrie’s screaming grew louder.

It hardly took Margaret a few moments to realize that Carrietta’s heart wasn’t slowing. She was bleeding, and she was clinging desperately to the last shreds of her strength, but she was nowhere near gone. She screamed louder, louder.

The front window exploded in a rain of glass. The shards fell like blue-green stones over the two. Forgiveness? Revenge?

Carrie felt something move inside her, something driven by her anger (flex) and hatred (flex) and pure devastation (flex, flex) and she saw a pulse in her peripherals that was slowly dying.

_Mama’s whimpering now. She can hardly breathe. Just a moment longer… just a moment…_

Margaret gave one last strangled inhale, her ribs barely opening up enough for her to breathe at all. One more, then her eyes widened and her lips (slowly, ever slowly) went pale, then went cold. She fought as long as she could, but eventually she succumbed and her head fell to the side. Head fell, eyes dulled, body went limp, mouth let out loud sigh, body fell from chair, blood trickled from lips. 

_Blood coloring pale lips like the lipstick Mama never let me wear. Mama would look lovely in lipstick._

_Mama. Wake up._

_Mama? I’m not joking, wake up!_

_MAMA!!_

Carrie let out the most horrifying, animalistic scream as she crumpled on the ground, wordless. Useless. Breathless. She had no energy and yet, she kept screaming, kept crying, kept sobbing and slamming her bloodied fist into the floor and holding her mama’s body and shaking it as if she was trying to wake a child.

Margaret used to hold Carrie just like this when she was younger. Cradled against her chest, holding her just so that when Carrie awoke each morning, she’d see her mama’s worldly, dark eyes. Her reflection shone in the dark irises.

Now Carrie was cradling Margaret just so that her eyes (hardly open) seemed as though they were almost looking at Carrie the way a child looks at her mother. 

_The way I always looked at Mama. Betrayed. Loved. Confused, afraid._

Carrie screamed, cried against her mother’s tangled hair, felt the tears run hot on her cheeks, felt her mama’s blood trickling down onto her shoulder (warm, warm blood) and the tears fell faster, her screams grew louder in a crescendo ascending directly from Hell (there could be no other origin for something so monstrous as this grief). The blood was hot and sticky and coppery and felt like fire on her skin in contrast to the mostly-dried-but-still-cold-and-smelling-of-rot pig’s blood she was covered with already. The feeling of her mama’s life running down her back was almost worse than the pig’s blood (and God made Eve to bear the curse of blood, _the curse of blood)_.

_God! Just let me die, God, please! Please please please please let me be with Mama I can’t do this anymore please just let me go!_

She screamed a scream that burned her throat raw, and she felt blood in her mouth and she didn’t know who it belonged to. She squeezed her mother (tighter tighter, then felt a soft release of pressure before a louder breaking sound. surely she couldn’t have cracked a rib), and as Carrie held Margaret in her arms, the walls of her house began to tremble and crumble with her sobs.

_________________

While Carrie White was grieving over her mother’s old-and-new-blood-covered body (as shingles fell from her roof and baseboards cried as they splintered and the vinyl siding cracked and slowly fell piece by piece into crumbles and dust around her), Susan Snell was following the path of blood and destruction to the White bungalow.

She felt guilty, guilty beyond comprehension, for every single thing that ever happened to Carrie White. She thought some part of her- no, most of her- could adore Carrie and all of her little idiosyncrasies. She thought she should have gotten to know her better, before teasing her like all the other girls did, for her long khaki skirts and soft pink sweaters, for the way her hair could have curled but hardly did, instead favoring a wispy frizziness that occasionally formed little ringlets around her head. No, Sue wished she never threw those tampons at her, she wished she’d never mocked her and yelled at her-

_“Plug it up, bitch!”_

The guilt pressed down on her, pelted at her dignity like a rain of stones. She wished she’d seen the beauty in Carrie White before she got so caught up in believing she was irredeemable. Now, wouldn’t it only be right to see herself as the irredeemable one? She couldn’t even stop the blood (two or three gallons, at least, of rot) or stop Chris or stop Carrie from destroying everything in her path, but could she even blame Carrie for all she’d done?

Maybe she didn’t do anything. Maybe it wasn’t ever Carrie who destroyed it all? Maybe it was Chris and Norma and Helen and Sue and Billy and Tommy and everyone who ever hurt her? Maybe Carrie was only the messenger. The vessel. The scapegoat.

Maybe the reason everyone was in such a rush to blame Carrie is because they wanted to do anything but blame themselves.

Sue expected she’d know which house was the White’s from memory, from the one time she’d driven over to pick up the dress her mother altered for her 17th birthday. The all-too-vivid memory of seeing Carrie through the window she’d forgotten to cover with curtains still clung to her mind. Carrie wore only her underwear, and she stood, running her hands over her skin while examining her reflection, as if her own body were something foreign. Sue couldn’t see her face. She wondered if Carrie were actually enjoying herself, or if she was too busy being horrified at what she saw in the mirror.

That was only a few days before the incident in the showers. A strange coincidence.

Sue didn’t need to draw back on the memories of her few times seeing Carrie’s house. The front window was blown out sometime earlier in the night (the same window she saw Carrie through that afternoon), and she felt the air around the small home hang differently around her. It felt harder to breathe. Maybe it was the fear and not the air at all.

She looked into the window, and she felt a wash of cold, wintery regret come over her the moment she saw the limp, blood-stained body of Margaret White, and the pattern the blood marks made on her nightgown could have only come from Carrie holding her.

Carrie, however, was nowhere to be found.

Sue staggered back, feeling tears in her eyes, but she heard something. A cry. Maybe it wasn’t a cry; maybe it was only a strong sense of urgency, a desperate intuition telling her to walk down the road farther, that she needed to reach the end of the street.

The end of the street was barely lit by the streetlights (trees seemed to consume the light from all the lamps), but she squinted and made out the shape of a body in the road, and then she heard the screaming again.

It was real. It was Carrie.

Sue started running.

_________________

The air on Carrie’s open gash stung her core and froze her from the inside out. The sensation was familiar enough, like the way her mother’s cigarettes felt when she put them out on her skin. The little circular scars all up and down her arms.

_Didn’t God have scars like these? Didn’t God have open wounds in the shape of little circles from the nails on the cross? Maybe these scars never meant weakness after all._

Only now did the pain begin to catch up to her. She’d remained numb to it until this point, but now, she’d become hypersensitive to the way the gravel felt against her elbows and knees and palms; she couldn’t ignore the way the bitter, yet oddly transformative, spring air felt as though it were eating her alive.

It was so much. She couldn’t keep it all in forever.

She didn’t know where she was going. She couldn’t walk, but she knew she had to get away from everything that’d been destroyed. She kept moving forward despite the only things ahead being smoke and ashes, and the only things behind being rubble and flames.

She felt her hands and knees screaming out against the rough gravel road. A road that had seen far too many drunken teens struggling to drive themselves home after a party. A road that had seen three different somebodies on three different occasions drive by her home for the sole purpose of turning their wood paneling into a canvas for an egg-based abstract painting. A road that had seen one violently-chalked declaration (Carrie White Eats Shit!) brought to life under the moon and meet Carrie’s eyes under the sunrise before school on a Friday (she didn’t attend that day. she told her mother she’d thrown up again). That road had seen more of the world than Carrie had, and somehow, Carrie knew worse pain. The road could never know heartbreak, for it didn’t have a heart. The road could never know how it feels to die, for it never lived, and yet, it had known more life than Carrie ever could.

And now Carrie was about to die on the only road she’d ever known. Even so… the road felt entirely new now that she’d marked it with ash and blood.

She had no reason to believe that, but the pain felt so raw and real and turned her into a whimpering animal and she felt absolutely _pathetic_ and she felt so out of place and like the pain shouldn’t be hers, like she didn’t deserve it. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did.

She swore she heard God call out for her. He said her name. She smiled. She stopped crawling and instead wrapped her arms around her knees, cradling her wounds against the rest of her body.

_God sounds more womanly than I imagined._

She heard God call for her again, then again, growing louder each time. She felt her eyes growing heavier. This was it. She was going. She felt God’s presence with her, and so she was unafraid in spite of it all. She jumped (though hardly) when she felt a hand on her upper back, carefully avoiding touching the bloodstain that spanned over almost half of her dress.

“Carrie, oh my God,” Sue said, tears weighing her eyelids down and threatening to spill all over Carrie, washing away the blood (she didn’t even know which creature the blood belonged to anymore). “Carrie. I’m here. I’m _here.”_

Everything in Carrie’s frail body tensed, and she suddenly wished Sue’s voice was the voice of God like she’d imagined. Sue. The last person she wanted to see, especially like this.

And yet, she fell into Sue’s arms and began to sob.

“I’m so afraid, I…” she started, though her words were hardly discernible when paired with her hitching breath and trembling voice. “I want Mama!”

Sue had no response prepared for that. In fact, she thought Carrie made the conscious choice to murder her mother alongside majority of the senior class of Ewen High School. Her eyes flickered down to Carrie’s dress, and she noticed the hand-sewn beaded appliqué ornamenting her waist. It would have looked lovely without all the blood, which had started to clot all over her dress. If Sue had ever smelt something foul in her life, she couldn’t recall it, not in comparison to smelling _death_ on a person who was very much _alive._

Carrie felt her own heart beginning to slow. She wanted to keep fighting it, but a part of her wanted to give in to the warmth and comfort of stillness. Even though she’d grown to hate Sue, she’d started to find her arms to be quite comfortable. She wrapped her arms around Sue’s, holding her head against the soft tan lace of her blouse. She felt a looming guilt for staining it with blood, but judging from the way Sue cradled her head when she leaned in, Carrie felt as though she might be forgiven.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Sue said, her voice barely able to break a whisper. She knew she was lying in at least some respect, but she also knew that if she did one more thing to hurt this pitiful creature who lay dying in her arms like an animal wounded in the middle of the road, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

Carrie looked up at Sue with eyes that seemed clouded while still somehow holding all the life in the world. All the fear in the world. All the doubt and dread and repentance and guilt in the world. Her eyes held the world, and she struggled to hold them open as she felt words clinging to her lips, struggling to make any sound.

“What… what… did I do…?”

Sue looked up to the sky and attempted to blink away her tears. _Fuck,_ she couldn’t help but think, so clearly it hurt her mind, _she doesn’t know. Of course she doesn’t know. She couldn’t have caused this._

Carrie didn’t cause anything. 

It took Sue until this very moment to realize that.

_Carrie couldn’t have caused anything,_ she processed in lightning-quick flashes, _because Carrie didn’t start this. We did._

Sue held Carrie closer and stroked her hair. She felt cold blood seep through her shirt and saturate her skin. 

_I did_.

“Nothing,” Sue answered Carrie, who only blinked slowly in response. Her eyes had already faded to a dull reflection of the little life she had left. It was as if the bloodied girl was asking for _permission_ to go (it would only be right. i have to repent before i pass on, and if i didn’t right my wrongs-).

But none of the destruction tonight was caused by her. Not according to Sue.

Carrie nodded slightly, a movement that soaked up the last of her energy, and as she closed her eyes and let out an exhale that weighed heavy with all the guilt she could finally leave behind, the cross pendant on her necklace broke free from the chain (flex) and slid down the front of her dress into Sue’s lap.

Carrie heard Sue sob, and the sound began to muffle, then fade, in her ears.

_Please, Jesus, show me mercy._

**Author's Note:**

> hello i hope u liked it
> 
> this is what i did to waste time during our two hours of school per day when i was in IOP and honestly?? i’m pretty sure if they saw what i was working on, they would have kept my ass there for another month
> 
> please comment ur thoughts though and lmk if you have any other ideas for carrie content bc there is a surprising lack of fics for this beautiful work!!!


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